Dr. David Ley’s “Ethical Porn for Dicks”, a review for guys. Guys who love porn and guys who struggle with their relationship with porn will want this.

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David Ley’s Ethical Porn for Dicks: A Man’s Guide to Responsible Viewing Pleasure is finally here. Guys who love porn and guys who struggle with their relationship with porn will find Ethical Porn a welcome addition to their personal sexual growth library.

What You Need To Know First

There are a few things you should know about David Ley first. “The ideas of porn and sex addiction are pop psychology concepts that seem to make sense, but have no legitimate scientific basis,” an opening line from Dr. Ley’s Psychology Today article “Porn Is Not The Problem, You Are” bluntly summarizing his position on porn addiction. He’s not popular in the psychology world for this position presumably because it’s not lucrative. Think of it — a psychologist telling you that you’re not addicted? Frankly, this alone made me want to read his book.

Secondly, you should know that Dr. Ley litters his prose with stray f-bombs and other such natural language as average guys use. Not exactly locker room fare, but frankness is king and the book wasn’t written for David Ley’s colleagues. It was written for guys.

Finally, you should know that the book is written from a combination of perspectives. The first is from the “experience of a psychologist, a therapist, and a scientist, who has studied, treated, written about and spoken/debated about porn use.” But also, and maybe more comforting is Dr. Ley’s perspective “…from the experience of a man, who, like most, has had porn as a part of my sexuality throughout most of my life.” His goal in writing this book was to integrate those two views. Both views come through clearly in both example and tone.

David Ley likes porn.

Porn in History and Culture

Ethical Porn for Dicks places porn squarely in the context of history and culture. While I’ve encountered some interesting articles eluding to porn’s influence on things like technology, economy and media, David Ley does a great job of dropping the information once again and saying, Hey, it is what it is and it’s not really bad! Frankly, I tire of the old line of whining, “When I was a kid we had to use our imaginations about sex, nowadays porn doesn’t leave anything to the imagination!”

Maybe not. Thank God. My imagination’s still intact. Ethical Porn helps guides us through this what I consider very natural cultural pornographic progression.

It’s common for guys to struggle with confidence in discussing porn once a relationship becomes significant. Porn brings an element of threat to the relationship because of it’s stigma and our lack of skill in discussing it. Dr. Ley devotes a significant amount of pages to guiding readers to competence in porn literacy.

But relationship is also more than just talking about sex. There’s the part where you actually have sex. Or, in the case of a lot of porn viewers, porn sometimes becomes preferable to sex. Yeah, David Ley talks about that, too. And, he covers those tricky issues about things like whether to send those “better than porn” pix of your dick to those you love. And the list goes on.

Nine out of ten times the reader is going to be wrestling with nagging guilt surrounding porn and issues of faith or religion. Clearly, David Ley is no Bible scholar and frankly carries very little clerical weight. However, he does raise some compelling discussion on religion and porn within a larger ethical context focusing on social justice and personal relationship. David calls on his readers to examine where porn use “…stands in the context of who you are, how you treat others, and yourself.”

Porn and Sexual Health

Dr. Ley kicks another hornets’ nest discussing porn and masturbation as well as porn and having “real sex”. He’s tangled with the No-FAP movement before but here he slams it without even mentioning it. Is penis-in-vagina sex better than jerking to porn? You’ll have to read Ethical Porn to find out.

Can You Think Of 101 Ways?

And Then There’s The Ethical Part of Ethical Porn

Questions of NSFW surfing as well as what kind of porn blatantly violates the law. Dr. Ley provides practical advice as to what to do if something with porn goes terribly wrong.

David Ley makes the valid point that you really can’t tell fair trade coffee from the other stuff. Is porn the same? Just because a porn performer is gagged, are they doing it by choice? You can enjoy porn and work to enjoy material that is ethical, respects performers, defends their rights and livelihoods as well as supports an amateur portion of the industry.

Ethical Porn For Dicks also includes a very comprehensive and annotated list of resources and researchers so that you can do your own research into pornography, the industry and the ethics.

Buy it. Buy it, now.

About The Author

David J. Ley, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and he directs an addiction recovery clinic in Albuquerque, NM. Dr. Ley is most recently known for his position opposing sex and porn addiction as a diagnosis revealed in his book, The Myth of Sex Addiction (2012) and his appearances with Anderson Cooper, Dr. Phil and Katie Couric.